“…yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” James 4:14-15
This morning I woke up with a mental to-do list that felt overwhelming. I’d managed to put away our fall decorations and hoped to get the kids to help me get started on decorating for Christmas. Tomorrow is one of my children’s birthdays, so that requires so planning. Plus I needed to get ready for the start of Advent, which our family enjoys taking time to reflect on together each night leading up to Christmas. Most pressing, I still had a lot of lesson planning to do as we get close to the end of the semester, so I hoped that could be my main focus. After a decent start to the morning, I headed next door to my parents’ house to see how their out-of-town Thanksgiving with extended family had gone. In the middle of our chat, however, I got a call that threw my plans for the day into a tailspin.
As soon as I saw the name pop up on my phone, I knew something major had happened. It was my niece, the daughter of a sister (well, half-sister, to be completely accurate) I didn’t grow up with but have relished getting to know even though I was in my twenties before I even learned her name. My niece and I have only met in person twice, and she just happened to have my phone number because I bought something from her once. She told me she was calling to let me know that her mom had passed away last night.
Wait, what???
My sister, the vivacious woman I had grown to love dearly as I enjoyed discovering all the little things we had in common despite being raised in completely separate families, was gone? She was just posting about Thanksgiving meals and passing on family traditions. She’s only 53! Eerily enough, that’s how old our grandmother was when she passed as well. But we were supposed to have decades more before something like this could happen. I don’t even know how to begin to process this information.
In some ways, it feels like I have no right to grieve. I didn’t even know of her existence until I was about fourteen. I spoke to her on the phone for the first time when I was twenty-three, a few days after learning her name. Over the next twenty-five years, I visited her twice at her house, and she came once to mine (we live almost 5 hours apart). We exchanged a few phone calls. Most of our communication was over Facebook and texting. Does that count as a sisterly relationship? Maybe not to some people, but I didn’t grow up with a sister, so it was precious to me. And now she’s gone, and I’m once again without a sister. Grief is so heavy.
Yet my to-do list for today remains. I’m going about daily tasks mechanically, feeling completely detached as I put away dishes or clean up messes in the kitchen. And in the midst of the grief that still feels so new I don’t know what to make of it, I find myself rooted by gratitude. I’m thankful for lesson plans created by others than I can lean on to help me get through class on Monday. I’m thankful that I’m not scheduled to serve at church tomorrow. I’m thankful that my kids are old enough to fend for themselves and don’t need me to get them through the day. I’m thankful for the support of my husband and friends, offering to lighten my load wherever possible. I’m thankful for my sister’s faith and the confidence I have that she is with the Lord. And every time my tears start to flow, I think of my sister’s children and grandchildren, offer up a prayer for them in their grief, and thank God that she lives on in them.
Requiescat in pace, soror mea.